Hey DoGoodery friends!

We had the wonderful opportunity to talk with Lesford Duncan, Executive Director of the Outdoor Foundation. Lesford tells us about his passion for the outdoors and how that has shaped his life’s purpose to reconnect young people and communities with nature.

Lesford’s story was so full of insights and inspiration, we decided to turn this into a two-part series!

Read on for Part 1 of Lesford’s story and his work:

DoGoodery: Please introduce yourself and give us a brief background on who you are and what you do.

Lesford: My name is Lesford Duncan and my pronouns are he/him. I am honored to serve as the Executive Director of the Outdoor Foundation.

The Outdoor Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Outdoor Industry Association, dedicated to increasing equitable access to outdoor recreation through both community investments and groundbreaking research. I’ve been working in the space of outdoor recreation and connecting youth and communities to transformative experiences in outdoor recreation over the past five years. I came to this work from a background in public and behavioral health and saw very much the intersection between access to nature and to outdoor recreation and how it improves not only physical health outcomes, but also mental health outcomes, resilience in youth, well being, joy, community, all of the things.

DoGoodery: Where does your love of the outdoors come from? Did your parents support that during your childhood?

Lesford: I grew up on Long Island, in a predominantly white community. My family was one of a few Black families in our communities with both of my parents immigrating to America from Jamaica. My dad was the proverbial story of arriving in America with $20 in his pocket, and wanting to create a life not only for himself but also for his future family and creating those opportunities for us. He was both entrepreneurial and adventurous in his own right, which sparked in me a curiosity for exploration.

I’ve always loved the outdoors. I’ve always loved exploring. And actually, I grew up a little bit of a troublemaker, so I was the one climbing every tree. I remember enjoying taking my bike and riding five miles from my house, all the way out to the coast from the age of 8 years old on my own, and then coming back home to tell my dad about it (albeit, I wouldn’t encourage that kind of solo adventure nowadays). My dad always encouraged that curiosity and that excitement, albeit risky. But I’ve always had this passion, this curiosity about nature and the outdoors.

DoGoodery: In your work with young people, is there a specific piece of advice that you find yourself repeating? What words of wisdom do you have for young activists?

Lesford: First off, I’ll say that my work directly with youth has been some of the most impactful of any of the work I’ve been a part of. Working directly with youth is so critical and I’ve learned a lot from them. Youth will humble you really quickly. They’ll remind you that they’re in charge and that the future is in their hands. But I think the cool thing about that is they also remind you of the reason why we’re doing this work.

Let me kind of cut to the chase and tell a particular story. One of the most impactful programs that I had the opportunity to be a part of and to help to build out at Outdoor Outreach was a program called Outdoor Voices. After having incredible outdoor experiences like camping, surfing, hiking, kayaking, this program allowed youth the opportunity to also be able to advocate on issues related to outdoor access or the environment or climate or conservation in meaningful and powerful ways. One person that comes to mind in particular that remains not only a mentee, but also a colleague and friend, to this day is Tatiana. Tatiana rode in a kayak for the first time through our programs at Outdoor Outreach. As she shares the story, her first time paddling was not necessarily the most positive experience. She felt very anxious on the water, but eventually as she kept pushing to do it, she found peace, serenity, and what she called her “here and now moment.” After going through our youth programs, she went through our Leadership Program. During our Leadership Program, I shared with her the opportunity to join a group of us in going up to the state capital to advocate around the implementation of the Outdoor Equity Fund, how it was going to be rolled out, how it was going to be utilized. She had the opportunity to come up to Sacramento and we met with Secretary Wade Crowfoot of the Department of Natural Resources and several others in the administration there. She was also very much actively involved in local efforts, efforts around investments in Emerald Hill Park, a local neighborhood park that was near to where Tatiana lived, and was able to successfully get hundreds of thousands of dollars invested into that park. Through that work, she decided that she was going to go on to study public policy to be able to continue to make a powerful difference. She did just that. She went on to study public policy at UC Berkeley and recently graduated magna cum laude. Tatiana is now diving into a career in environmental public policy which is really awesome.

One of the things I would say is that we need to take youth seriously. Youth are not props in environmental activism, they are the reason why we advocate for the environment. They care deeply about the environment and they’re realizing firsthand the impacts of climate change and environmental injustice. They want to be a part of the solution. So taking our youth really seriously and engaging them meaningfully in local efforts all the way to state and federal policy is really critical to moving this work forward, especially as we think of youth of color and those that are disproportionately impacted by environmental justice issues. That would be my biggest thought, my biggest piece of advice is taking our youth seriously and making sure that we’re engaging them in those critical discussions.

DoGoodery: Please tell us about Thrive Outside. What is it? Why is it important to you? What have you learned from it, both as a grant recipient and now director of the program?

Lesford: Thrive Outside is super cool! That’s my quote. [laughs] The Outdoor Foundation has been investing in equitable access to outdoor participation since its inception in 2000. Prior to five years ago, it was investing directly in community-based programs and initiatives that were doing just that. However, five years ago, we made a slight shift to deepening impact through investments in coalitions. What makes Thrive Outside unique is it invests in a collective impact approach to increasing equitable access to outdoor recreation. And what does that mean? That means it’s helping communities come together to get more kids and families outdoors. This includes community-based youth organizations, schools and school districts, health and social service organizations, local businesses, private philanthropy, local government, state government. We’re working together and a little further upstream in addressing some of the barriers to access and expanding opportunities to get outdoors.

This initiative started five years ago. That was right at the time that I joined a nonprofit based in San Diego called Outdoor Outreach. Outdoor Outreach works to connect thousands of youth each year to transformative experiences in the outdoors. San Diego was one of the first four Thrive Outside communities that were developed. For the first time, multiple funders and program partners in the region were coming together and aligning their strategy on equitable access. How do we develop a plan for increasing equitable access? How do we address the barriers to access, such as gear, information, transportation, and safety? Led by the San Diego Foundation, who published their Parks for All report, they brought together a group including community-based organizations, grantees of both the San Diego Foundation as well as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and academia and were able to create really innovative programming through that collaboration. We were also really effective in providing training to environmental organizations and land management agencies through our Leaders for Outdoor Equity initiatives, and informing state and local policy around outdoor equity. It was a really cool collaborative effort that measurably helped to increase outdoor participation in San Diego.

Broadening out to the national initiative, we currently have 13 Thrive Outside communities across the country. This past year, those communities helped engage over 95,000 youth in the outdoors, which by itself is really, really cool but I think it takes even a step further than that. I’ve shared some of the policy wins for Thrive Outside San Diego, but we’ve also seen some really cool work on the local and state policy level to address inequities in outdoor recreation in several other Thrive communities. Thrive Outside Maine, for example, was successful in securing millions of dollars in state resources to further outdoor and climate education for youth. I also think about Thrive Outside Grand Rapids that has done some phenomenal work through the City of Grand Rapids to develop a gear lending library to make outdoor gear accessible to children, youth, and families that might otherwise not afford it. And the efforts of several other Thrive Outside communities to address systemic barriers, in addition to some of the direct programming that they’re providing.

This work is really important because community-based organizations need added capacity. Beyond charitable investments in this work, we need committed public funding, public dollars to support this work. Our Thrive Outside communities are very much driving that and are securing additional resources to sustain this work long after the Outdoor Foundation’s initial investment.

DoGoodery: You were with Outdoor Outreach when they received the Thrive Outside grant, but in March 2020, so many things changed, including putting major limitations on grant recipients’ planned activities. Ultimately, you learned how meaningful those investments were even with those massive changes. Could you speak more to the potential of this investment in building communities of support?

Lesford: I’ve been on a couple of panels recently on trust based philanthropy and ways that philanthropy really needs to show up in this work in order to support sustained change. The investment through the Thrive Outside initiative definitely, as you mentioned, helped us as a program in San Diego throughout the pandemic to be able to weather that storm. It brought together a community of practice that leaned on each other heavily throughout the pandemic.

I think about the importance of multi-year sustained investment by philanthropy as well, which has been something that I’ve been a huge advocate for, in creating real, sustained change. So often, outdoor recreation is seen as “nice to have”, especially amongst so many of the other critical needs across our community. Food security is very much a pressing need, making sure that people are housed is a critical need, ensuring that healthcare is accessible is an essential need. And then when you think about outdoor recreation, you think about folks getting out and skiing, climbing, paddling, and having a blast – you don’t think about how essential it really is until a year like 2020 hits. During the pandemic and racial awakening of 2020, we saw anxiety and mental illness skyrocket amongst youth. It was during that time that many of our youth at Outdoor Outreach helped to advocate for the reopening of California State Parks, because they saw how essential it was. They wanted a platform to speak that truth to power, to speak directly to public agencies about what mattered most to them. Outdoor Outreach helped to create that platform and that happened because of sustained, committed funding through philanthropy. It addresses the root causes that shift us away from thinking about outdoor recreation as a charitable “nice to have, we’ll give a couple thousand dollars to run this program” to “how do we invest in the long-term accessibility of outdoor recreation in ways that improve the health and well being of communities?”